Typewriter effect in After Effects

[JazzyDJ]

What's a good easy way to make the typing effect with your text and be able to use fancy looking effects on top of the text at the same time? (Like the glow plugin and grids, etc.) I heard about image lounge's typwriter effect wich looks perfect, but there's a problem. I don't have the money to buy it. Any suggestions or ideas on other ways to achieve this or know of a free plugin that would do the same thing?

[JD_Lord1]

i just did some typing in ae without any plug ins and it can be pretty laborious depending on how much you plan to have "typed." the way i did it was to first create a text layer. say for instance the word is "Hot." for each letter you add a key frame. so basically on the first frame you have "H" then you move over a frame and add the "O" and then move over one more to add the "T." so in three frames you have H, HO, and lastly HOT. you can then spread these keyframes out so that they show up at different intervals and look more like they are being typed.

as for special effects...in ae there is obviously a shit ton of stuff to do and it usually ends up being complicated. one thing you can do is turn the letters into masks or solid objects by right clicking the layer and selecting something like "Turn into masks..." other than that i'm pretty sure you can add effects to the actual text layer. i don't have the program on the computer i'm making this post with so sorry if it lacks some clarity.

also if you plan on just having the text on a solid color background you can also simply add another solid layer of the same color on top and then just move it off each letter at the right moment... this way you have your complete text already written out and you just reveal each letter one at a time.

[chui101]

Create a comp, we'll call this 'Text'. Create your text inside this comp, and create a text animator on that to make your typewriter effect.

Create a second comp, we'll call this 'Effect'. Add the 'Text' comp as a new layer in the 'Effect' comp, and from there you can add your glow effect and whatnot.

Adds a bit of processing complexity, so if your computer is slow you may want to precomp it.

[arithine]

Chuui has the right idea. To get the actually type writing effect I would just mess around with the different text animators(at the moment i can't remember what they are called) available in After Effects.